


Samsara Can Take a Day Off

by KeirMoonrock



Series: Walk On [3]
Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Adopted Children, Alcohol Withdrawal, Alcoholism, COVID-19, Dysfunctional Family, George is Straight-Up Not Having A Good Time, If that turns you off, Just something going on in the background, M/M, Marital Stress, Mention of Suicidal Ideation, Oh the virus isn't a major plot point, Past Child Abuse, Past drug addictions, Sobriety, Therapy, angsty teens, depression and anxiety, family au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29591460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeirMoonrock/pseuds/KeirMoonrock
Summary: Just to set the record straight, George Starkey was never looking forward to 2020. It was hard to look forward to anything, he thought, trying to make ends meet for an alcoholic and much-in-debt husband, a hotheaded burglar son, a bemused and funeral-clad daughter, and an eight year-old learning that his family stood in stark and rather grim contrast to those of his friends'.Of course, the pandemic didn't help anything—once that had hit, George had simply braced himself for Ritchie's record shop to close and prepared to lose his mind in those walls.But oddly enough, quarantine would prove itself to be a motivating force for good among the Starkeys.After a whole lot of mind-losing, that is.(The threequel to "Digging a Hole and Drinking Wine" and "And Why Not You?")
Relationships: George Harrison/Ringo Starr, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney, Zak Starkey/Sarah Menikides
Series: Walk On [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991308
Comments: 16
Kudos: 10





	1. Hope, For Once

**Author's Note:**

> Well, everybody, after a whole month of sitting on the edge of your seats, I'm sure, you can relax. Keir Moonrock is alive and well and writing the third installment of this series, for anyone who's stuck around long enough to read it all. I would normally give a spiel here about how I've been lucky enough not to encounter any of the problems described in my works, and how I remain committed to portraying them with some shred of accuracy, but, uh... things have changed slightly. Suffice it to say I still remain committed to my work, though I have a better grasp on the reality of some of these issues.
> 
> Chapters should come out at a relatively even pace, although I admit that it may not be as quick as fans of my work (if you exist) are used to.
> 
> I should also note that this work (as with its predecessors) will dive into some rather uncouth and disturbing topics, touching on depression, suicidal ideation, alcoholism and drug addiction, and the effects of childhood abuse/neglect. Warnings for such topics will be appropriately distributed in the notes, and should you at any point feel as though reading about them may put you in a dangerous or otherwise unpleasant mental state, I advise you to take the most appropriate course of action for your health and safety. 
> 
> That being said, thank you for coming, and please enjoy the ride.
> 
> -Keir Moonrock

After one week on lockdown, the United Kingdom and everyone living in it was tired.

Working from home was easier said than done, as the population discovered, when one’s children weren’t out of school indefinitely, running around the house like it was nobody’s business.

And that was only an issue for those lucky enough to work.

The others were left like corpses in a shipwreck, hurled into the sea without a life preserver to their name, holding onto whatever hope they could.

The issues on the horizon had already been predicted by the nation’s leading doctors, psychologists, and economists; it was clear from a mile away that the general population—along with nearly everyone on Earth—was about to experience one of the sharpest recorded increases in all of those measures that should under no circumstances skyrocket.

Obviously, the death rate would begin to rise. That was a given considering the nature of the disaster. And beyond that, so would unemployment. Small businesses stood with one foot in the grave, young people coming out of school and university were to be met with a brick wall upon their graduation (should it take place at all) and the stock market as a whole was expected to crash any moment.

Children and adults both would feel the ramifications of their newly isolated lifestyles, the damage to their social lives presenting as an intense surge in the already skyrocketing cases of mental illness and overall distress.

And to set the record straight, George Starkey was  _ very  _ well aware of these things.

He was just as vulnerable to the pandemic, after all, as any other Englishman. He was frustrated trying to work from home while his children were given free reign of his house. He was  _ especially  _ frightened of the financial ramifications of the virus, being married to the owner of an already struggling music shop. And believe me, he had seen the cliff-dive decrease in mental health from a mile away.

But somehow, George was still surprised to discover the full extent of his husband’s alcohol stash. 

See, George had decided, while in that limbo between the shutdown and his boss figuring out how to squeeze more work out of him from home, that he would make good use of the time and take a day to clean the house head to toe, dusting and scrubbing and shining whatever his eyes fell upon. If he had to stay at home, he thought, then he might as well have made it look nice. 

And he did dust and scrub and shine.

He also found alcohol tucked away in every nook and cranny, hidden for Ritchie’s out-of-sight enjoyment, much to his husband’s dismay. 

Combining the booze in the house pre-pandemic with that brought home (unannounced and as hastily as possible) from Ritchie’s shop, it totaled the following:   
Thirty-two bottles of wine, ranging from nearly empty to entirely full; Seven six-packs of beer for a sum of forty-two individual cans; One and a half bottles of whiskey; Three-quarters of a bottle of vodka; And a teeny, tiny, nearly insignificant amount of gin—in the bottle, that is.

Ritchie’s glass, in comparison, was bountifully filled.

So much so that he nearly spilled it stepping into the kitchen that evening.

“Jesus Christ!” he gasped. “What are you doing?”

George let out a long sigh and turned around. “You know, Ritchie, I thought I would take the day to deep clean the house.” 

Before his husband got the chance to ask, the man gestured to every bottle, can, and glass on the countertop.

“Instead,” George said. “I spent it collecting all of  _ this _ .”

Ritchie’s face grew grim.

His husband only crossed his arms, asking, “Do you see how ridiculous this is, all put together?”

Now, the key thing to understand was that that was something of a rhetorical question. For that matter, every discussion between the men was something of a rhetorical conversation.

George could make all the points he wanted about Ritchie’s alcoholism, if he would just find the strength. But the day the man actually listened to him would come only when Hell had frozen over and pigs had flown to Heaven.

The very act of assembling the alcohol was little more than an insult; it was a half-hearted jab at Ritchie that George knew from the start wouldn’t lead to any actual change, because to put it simply, Ritchie’s list of priorities started with booze and ended with…. well, everything else. 

Imagine George’s surprise when his husband set his gin and tonic down and looked him in the eye.

He almost couldn’t believe it, he was in such a state of shock. 

It was like some spirit had broken into their bedroom in the night and stolen Ritchie’s body, swapping him with a fake willing to listen to George.

His voice was quiet, his face stiff as stone as he asked, “You found all of it?”

George frowned. “I found… as much as I could. Unless there’s mo—”

“In the car,” his husband said. “The rest’s in the car.”

The other man’s mouth hung open, stunned. “You mean to tell me there’s  _ more _ ?”

“Of course there’s more,” Ritchie laughed, a pitiful and pathetic sound. “Take one look at me, George, why wouldn’t there be?”

George didn’t answer the question.

He supposed there was no case to be made.

At least his husband could admit it, George that. At least Ritchie knew the rut he was in.

Call it insignificant if you want, but it was a major step forward for Ritchie. There had been many nights—too many nights—where the man had argued drunkenly and passionately that there was nothing wrong with him, that he was in a perfectly acceptable position, as far as his drinking was concerned, and that it was just the way he was.   
It was fine, he said. It was in his control.

Those were the nights that ended with George resentful of himself for marrying such a man, and Ritchie blacked out on the sofa (if he was lucky). 

The nights they truly hated each other.

They carried on into the day sometimes, tense and unspoken. The air hung heavy with glaring thoughts, but was thin, frail, and fragile in reality. One wrong move could bring the whole house down.

So no moves were ever made. Outside of those drunken and emotionally unhinged fights, George and Ritchie didn’t talk, though they both knew they should have.

It was unbearable, George thought, standing there next to Ritchie—to the man he used to spend hours rambling to—and being unable to squeak out a simple,  _ good night _ . 

But he was much too shy of a man to take a stand and go against the painfully unchanging status quo. He always had been.

A long time ago, long before any fights or blackouts or incidents in which the flowers were angrily uprooted from the garden, this hadn’t been an issue. George had been content in knowing that where he was prone to withdraw, Ritchie was able to step forward. Where he was weaker, Ritchie was more bold.

They made ends meet that way.

Well, they used to.

George was fairly confident—almost pessimistic, really—that they never would again.

There was surprise number two.

“You know,” Ritchie said, a deep, nervous breath crossing his lips. “I don’t know what it is, really, but I look at all of this and…”

George’s frown set into his face like plaster, preparing himself for the ensuing argument.

“I think of Jay.”

“Jay?” His husband asked, stunned beyond belief, too confused by the lack of expected catastrophe to feel relieved. “Like Jason?”

“Yeah,” Ritchie nodded.

George’s face contorted, his brow furrowing in puzzled uncertainty. He watched his husband close, studying him like the exam was tomorrow, trying to discern what in God’s name their son had to do with the situation.

He felt a lump form in his throat.

His voice low, almost mocking, he asked, “Are you telling me that Jason was the one that brought this all home and not  _ you _ ?”

His husband’s eyes shot up, his gaze snapping into place. 

He grew defensive, shooting back, “No… I just mean that—” His muscles tensed. “God. Just forget about it, alright?”

George didn’t move. 

He wasn’t sure how to.

Meanwhile, the words seemed to spill out of Ritchie like blood out of a gunshot wound, mumbling, “God… I’m sorry, just let me—”

He stood up then, hands reached out to reclaim his bottles.

George perked up, insisting, “No, you’re not taking anything.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Ritchie sighed. “I ain’t got nothin’ else to do.”

His husband’s mouth went dry. “Just sit down, why don’t you? I think we ought to talk.”

But Ritchie wasn’t having any of it. 

“For fuck’s sake,” he groaned. “What are we supposed to talk about? I just tried that, you half-wit, and look how well that went!”

“We need to talk about this, Ritchie,” George reminded. “You said it yourself, this is mad! There… this is completely  _ ridiculous,  _ havin’ this much booze in the house. And you’re hiding it?”

The other man raised his eyebrows. “Of course I’m hiding it! Look what happens when you find it!”

George felt his temperance sink in his stomach. There was no getting around it now—the fight was on.

“So you’re scared, then,” he accused. “You’re scared of me calling you out for it.”

Ritchie’s whole face went slack, and then grew red-hot expressive as he cried, “Sure! Yeah, okay, maybe I am! I think anybody would be, with the stick you’ve got up your arse!”

“Oh, you did  _ not  _ just—”

“Why have you got to make it all about you?!” the man asked. “I’m trying to talk to you here, and if I’m not mistaken, that’s  _ what you want _ , and all you can think to do is complain that I’m doing it! Because it’s not my problem, now, is it? All of a sudden it’s yours.”

“Ritchie, you’re not making any sense. And Good God, if you want to talk to me, then you’re gonna have to come up with a better hook than  _ get the stick out yer arse _ .”

His husband was dumbfounded.

“Don’t you think I’ve  _ tried  _ that?!” he cried. “That’s—I’ve been trying like you wouldn’t believe, and everytime it just turns into you shouting at me!”

“Are you really trying to talk to me,” George sighed, frustrated. “By blaming our son for bringing home all of this?”

“No!” Ritchie shouted, face red with rage, shame, and alcoholism, respectively. “No! For God’s sake, didn’t you get that the first twenty times I told you?! I—”

He shook his head, though his hands shook as well. 

“Just forget about it,” he grumbled. “I’m done. Just forget it.”

“Come on now,” George rushed, caught in the same predicament as his husband. “What good is it gonna do if you leave?”

“None!” Ritchie laughed, sure of himself. “I know that much—it’s not gonna do shit! But dear God, I think it’s better than trying to sort out  _ this whole mess _ .”

“It’s not complicated. We can—Ritchie, you and I both know that this isn’t good for you.”

“Yeah,” the man groaned. “I’m aware.”

“And you don’t want to keep this up, do you?”

Ritchie shook his head, running his hand along his chin as he walked back and forth through the kitchen. “We’re not getting into this,” he said. “Listen, that’s a whole can of worms that I’m not even going to touch—I shot my shot, I had my chance, and clearly neither of us are in any kind of talking mood.”

George felt the tide rise in the sea that was his soul—there was contradiction afoot, a familiar and desperate need to get the word in while it was possible, to buckle down and talk no matter what.

It was true that he and Ritchie were fighting. But he would take a slightly aggressive fight over a full-on plate-smashing, insult-hurling, divorce-wishing fight anyday.

The opportunity, he knew, may have never come again. What had started out as little more than a jab at his husband to half-heartedly remind him he had a serious problem had spiraled into an actual chance for change, be that in thoughts or actions.

Though George’s hopes were low—they always were when it came to his husband—he was deadset on trying just one more time to make Ritchie see things his way.

“I know it’s hard,” he said, trying to suppress the panic in his voice. “I know damn well that it’s hard to even think of, but could you please try?”

Ritchie stood still.

And so his husband continued, “You remember what it was like before, don’t you? After Dhani was born?”

“Of course I remember. God knows that’s all I  _ can  _ remember…”

“So you can get back to that place!” George illustrated. “If you would just put in the work, and I know that—”

Ritchie’s arms shot up in the air, tense. “For God’s sake, George, will you give it a rest? I told you we’re not opening this can of worms, and I mean it! It isn’t just as simple as puttin’ down the bottle! There’s—God, we’re not getting into this, but you haven’t got the  _ slightest  _ idea what this is like.”

He shook his head. “I’m sick and tired of you pretending you do.”

“Fair enough,” George shrugged. “If that’s how you feel, then why don’t you tell me what it’s like?”

This only aggravated his husband further. 

“You don’t want to hear that shit,” he said. “Listen, I told you what goes through my head, you’d be on you’re arse, stunned. I’m not doin’ that to you.”

George held his tongue to keep from pointing out such blatant hypocrisy.

His husband wouldn’t bother to tell him what he thought so as not to hurt him, he thought, but after two or three or ten drinks, Ritchie would waste no time in literally uprooting George’s plants and family.

“If I didn’t want to hear it,” George said, a hint of frustration behind his facade of collectivity. “Then I wouldn’t have brought it up. There’s not much you could surprise me with, I think. We’ve lived with each other long enough…”

The other man gave a pathetic laugh.

“And how much of that time have we actually  _ liked  _ each other?” he asked. “Listen, you can tell me you know everything under the sun about me, but I don’t tell you even a quarter of what I think… just look at how well that goes down.”

“Ritchie,” George sighed, annoyed. “What do you think I’m going to do? I’m… I’m not your mum, love. I’m not going to ground you if you just tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Maybe not,” his husband shot back. “But I did just try, now, didn’t I? I tried and all you did was spin me into some kind of villain. I don’t know what you think, but I’m not all that interested in playing the devil.”

George was confused, to say the least.

“I turned you into a villain? When…?”

“Jesus Christ! Have you got the memory of a goldfish?! I’m tryin’ to open up here, talkin’ about Jason and all the bottles… and all you could do is ask me why I’m accusing him of bringin’ them home!”

George drew back, face flushing under such scrutiny.

“Really,” Ritchie rambled on. “What’s your problem? Have you really got to get the last word in that badly? To the point of sabotagin’ yourself? I just…”

He looked his husband in the eyes, and then, in a desperate, almost childishly helpless voice, he asked, “George, why can’t you just trust me? Why—what do you take me for, some kinda kid?”

“I…”

“I’m not some criminal that you’ve got to constantly watch out for. Frankly, I’m offended that you keep treating me like I am.”

George’s mouth hung open in a gape for a moment, astounded and ashamed.

“I’m not...” he staggered. “Trying to…”

Ritchie only frowned. 

And seeing this, George felt something he hadn’t felt it a good long while.

It was pure, hard, undiluted guilt, spilling through his body like liquid mercury, and just about as poisonous.

It had come and gone like the wind in the past couple of years, keeping him company once the kids had been put to bed, hanging over his head as he watched his friends and family enjoy much happier, much more fulfilling marriages… suffice it to say that George had gotten to know the feeling rather well.

But to feel it for something he had done to Ritchie—something to genuinely hurt the other man, as opposed to the common enough distortion that led George to believe he was to bear the blame for his husband’s alcoholism—that was something different.

He felt his shoulders grow heavy, his face light, like all the beetroot skin had been ripped from his face, his eyeballs plucked out and his teeth torn out of his gums.    
But he didn’t fully trust it.

Ritchie had made him feel a lot of things over the years; everything from joy to pain to blackhearted hatred and red-faced anger. But especially with those darker emotions, it was hardly ever intentional.

See, Ritchie said a lot of things when he was drunk, or angry, or in one of those pessimistic funks he found himself in on occasion. He would snap like a shark at George, sometimes just for the sake of getting under his skin.

As a result, it had become very difficult for the man to tell whether Ritchie was genuinely expressing his frustration and calling George out on a rightful wrong of his, or if he was just trying to guilt-trip him.

George stood still in the kitchen.

As did Ritchie. 

Time, on the other hand, was not able to read the room.

Every cell in George’s brain was pleading with him to make some kind of move, to say something, if only for the sake of speeding things up (he hated wasting time, after all) but he was at a total loss for words.

What was he supposed to say, he wondered? Telling Ritchie he felt like he was being manipulated would do little more than send the man spinning with rage. But to say anything else would be a lie, and not only a lie, but a lie that could have kept George right where his husband wanted him—under his thumb, to quote the fab five.

Ritchie kept his arms crossed, his weight leaned back against the countertop like any other position would be too exhausting.

He didn’t look at George. And George didn’t return the favor, either.

The clock chimed somewhere up above the men, the great big grandfather clock in the dining room, reminding George that his time to speak was running short.

Soon enough, it told him, if he kept his silence, Ritchie would grow frustrated and leave.

He would take the alcohol with him.

So begrudgingly—almost demandingly—George called back to mind his spur of the moment change in intent.

He wasn’t there just to poke at his husband’s issues anymore. He was there to address them.

And if there was anything he had learned, as a father, as a husband, and as an eternal mute, then it was this:

Sometimes people had to be pleased. Sometimes what they needed to hear was what you disagreed with. 

George had this in mind as he sighed, “I’m sorry, Ritchie. You’re right—I need to trust you.”

At the same time, he couldn’t shake the thought that someone whose alcohol addiction and general competence had spiralled so out of control weren’t the ideal candidates for his trust.

Maybe that said more about him than Ritchie. 

Speaking of, the other man sent his gaze back to George.

“Thank you,” he nodded in earnest. 

The clock ticked.

And then, his shoulders tensing before slumping back down, he added, “I... shouldn’t have lost my temper like that. I’m sorry.”

George’s eyebrows raised. Another new thing.

The world around him didn’t feel real; he couldn’t shake the feeling that in a second, he would wake up and find himself in his bed. He would take a look in the corner and find something completely out of place, only to open his eyes and end up under his sheets.

Then again, he wasn’t complaining.

He would revel in the dreamworld for as long as he possibly could.

“It’s alright,” he sighed. And for once in his life, he meant it. “Now… do you want to talk?”

Ritchie looked over at him, confused. “Ain’t that what we’re doing right now?”

“About how you feel, I mean,” George explained. “You were sayin’ about Jason earlier, and I think we’re more than due to—”

Hearing this, the other man seemed just as surprised as his husband. He blinked a couple of times, as if to double-check his surroundings.

“Oh,” Ritchie said after a moment. “Sure.”

But neither of them moved.

God, George thought. If he knew it was going to be that awkward (painfully so, considering it was just him and his partner of twenty-three years) then he never would have asked at all. 

“Should we sit down?” Ritchie asked after a moment. 

George was already moving towards the sofa when he answered, “I suppose so.”

And once they were both situated (both staring at the floor and twiddling their thumbs, unsure of where to begin) he asked, “You were talking about Jason?”

The other man nodded. “I guess. I mean, he and I were talkin’ a little while ago.”

“No kidding,” George mumbled, a bit stunned.

Ritchie laughed. “Well, maybe a  _ little  _ kidding. He’s not one to talk, you know. He’s one to yell.”

“That seems more like it.”

“I’d say so,” he sighed. “See, the cashier had gone off somewhere—I forget where exactly, but I know he had done it—and apparently, he had told Jay to keep his seat warm ‘till he came back.”

“Alright.”

“Now, I come out me office, and I see him sittin’ there, and I’ll be honest, alarm bells start goin’ off in my head. Looking back on it, I guess I do think I was a little harsh, but it’s what happened, nonetheless.

“I see him,” he went on. “And he’s not doin’ anything, he’s not hurtin’ nobody, but the first thing that comes into my head is: He’s gonna take the cash from the register and use it to buy drugs.”

George frowned.

He was certainly just as concerned for Jason—if not more so—than his husband, fearing the worst in regards to the boy’s festering (and in hindsight obvious) addiction to adderall.

It was uncountable just how many times George had tried to approach him about it, whether to confront or soothe or just check in. The only thing the attempts had in common was that they failed every time.

He suspected that Jason had taken a page out of Ritchie’s book, knowing that the two, while biologically unrelated, acted a great deal like each other. That is to say, George thought (or really, knew for a fact) that his son did would sooner die than let anyone else help him.

Jason was wildly independent; he was a kid with a rebellious streak, the type that purposefully went against other people’s warnings.

Anything he was told to do, he would do the opposite—at least if his parents were the ones telling him. 

So if he ever were to swear off drugs, George knew that the motivation would have to come from a thought Jason had had himself. He would have to be the one to come up with it, and he would have to be the one to complete it. Anything else was unacceptable. 

This put George in a very precarious position, as a parent.

And so he did what he always did in precarious situations. He shut right up like a clam. 

But as far as the communication between Jason and Ritchie was concerned… Well, George had no idea if it even existed. 

Needless to say, he wasn’t exactly dying to hear how his husband’s story ended.

“I tell him that,” Ritchie went on. “Not super aggressive, mind you, but I did tell him. And boy, did he give me hell for that one. He started chasin’ me around, he was yellin’ and cursin’—all that sorta thing.”

“I can hear it now,” the other man sighed.

“Bet ye can. Anyhow, we got into a bit of a fight.”

Ritchie’s eyes shifted nervously here, his face flushing.

“I… I don’t really remember what all was said,” he admitted. “Just that he was mad and thought I was a hypocrite.”

It took George a moment to understand why.

But when he did, it weighed on him.

Jason wouldn’t be the one to steal money from the shop and spend it on his vice of choice—the man that would was sitting right across from George.

“Still,” Ritchie went on. “There was somethin’ about it that caught my attention. I… I guess I was in a crabby mood that day—I have a vague memory of it—but there was something he said that really struck me, you dig?”

George nodded. “I dig it just fine.”

The question was rhetorical, of course. 

But that didn’t stop him.

Ritchie cleared his throat, and for a minute his husband worried that he may have contracted that most frustrating of viruses that stuck them together in the house, but such notions were quickly dispelled, the other man sighing, “He was rattling off everything he could think about me. I really don’t remember it anymore, but there was one thing he said…”

His eyes, the brightest blue George had ever seen, grew glassy. Somehow, he thought, they looked sadder than usual.

“He said I was in some kind of a hole. And I’ll agree with him there. You know, I think about that a lot.”

George gave a puzzled look.

“It’s like… like with my drinking,” Ritchie explained. “I’ve just kept on drinking, and every time I do it, I dig deeper into this hole I’m in—this whole rut. Then I panic because I’m in it at all, but by that point…”

He sighed.

“Well, by that point, I’m too deep in it to get out.”

George raised his eyebrows, his lips parting eagerly to remind his husband that there was no such thing as  _ in too deep _ , that anyone could be saved if they just put their mind to it.

But Ritchie was surprisingly talkative that evening.

In a good way, at that!

“So he told me that,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what, I couldn’t agree more! It was so surreal, hearing that from him… in my own head, I guess I don’t really notice it.

“Then the other thing he said about that really threw my day off. He said, ‘If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.’”

“Words of wisdom,” George mused, taking great satisfaction in joking with his husband again.

“Tell me about it. It’s all I’ve been thinkin’ about for weeks now.” Ritchie shook his head, running his hand along the length of his beard as he repeated to himself, “Yeah… yeah…”

“Come to any conclusions?” his husband asked, feeling so oddly at ease with the man that he could have lit a cigarette right then and there. “I mean, if you’ve thought so much…”

Ritchie’s face grew stony. 

He pursed his lips for a moment, the corners of his mouth tucking inwards as he pondered the question.

And then, with a semi-anxious laugh, he answered, “The only conclusion I’ve come to is that I’ve really fucked up here. I’ve fucked up, George, and I’ve fucked him up along with me. I fucked everyone over.”

Before George could get the chance to refute the notion (purely for etiquette’s sake, as he was well aware that his husband was telling the truth, even if it was self-deprecating) Ritchie added:

“I’m… I’m done with it. I can’t keep doin’ this George. There may not be any easy way out, and I might not have the guts to go the way I keep tellin’ myself I will, but by God, I’ve got to get outta this… who knows what kinda damage I’ll do if I just stay like this.”

The other man couldn’t believe what he was hearing. 

George was unable to move his lips, he was so profoundly shocked by the idea.

“Are you— What—”

His face, his speech, his mannerisms—they weren’t just puzzled. They were just-came-out-of-a-coma dazed.

“Run that by me one more time,” he said, his voice unusually high-pitched.

Ritchie shrugged. “I mean… I’ve thought about it a lot, I’ve slept on it and all the rest, and I’ve realized that I can’t keep doin’ this. Believe it or not, I want to get back to the way things used to be—a part of me does, anyways.”

“So you’re saying…”

“I’m sayin’ I wanna stop this,” Ritchie said, brow furrowing. “I wanna stop drinking. At the very least, I’d like to stop feelin’ like shit all the time… now, I’ve come up with a whole series of ideas for how to do  _ that _ ,” A long, dark shadow cast over his face, a whisper of the unimaginable piercing his soul as he mumbled, “But I’m afraid I haven’t got the guts for a lot of ‘em. So that only leaves me with one choice, I guess.”

“And what’s that?” George asked, his whole body leaned forward, his elbows on his knees as he braced himself for whatever he may have heard next. 

The answer was simple.

“To get sober again.”

But it sent George spinning. 

His mind seemed to melt, a million thoughts running through his head and heart as he tried to process this idea.

But after just a second of this discombobulation, he decided that there was only one, at that time, that mattered. 

And that was thanking every god he could think of—Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, you name it—that the day had finally come.

“You’re serious about this?” George asked, already out of breath, though he hadn’t said anything. 

His husband gave a slow, almost uncertain nod. “I’m as serious as I’ll ever be, I guess. Of course there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to do it… but that’s just the name of the game, you know? It’s only natural.”

“Right,” the other man blinked. “Of course.”

Tilting his head a little, a nervous sort of smile passed over Ritchie’s face. 

He leaned into George’s line of sight, his eyebrows raised as he asked, “Are you alright? You look a little… well, you seem like you’ve got somethin’ to say.”

Hearing this, seeing the look on his husband’s face, George couldn’t help but wonder how long it had been—how painfully long—since he had last seen that smile of Ritchie’s. The cheeky expression of his that somehow managed to blur the lines between a charming young man and a social know-nothing… George hadn’t realized how much he had missed it until that moment.

“I’m just—” he blurted, betraying his temperance. “Christ, Ritchie, you haven’t got any idea how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.”

His husband stayed rather humble, staring down at the ground without so much as a proud grin, admitting, “It’s one my better ideas.”

“I’ll say!” George laughed. “Oh dear God, I’m sorry—”

“What for?”

“I’m sorry,” the man repeated, growing flustered. “Geez, I hate actin’ like this, but… I don’t know if I ever thought I’d hear you say  _ that _ .”

Ritchie didn’t move.

In fact, his response was rather blunt.

“I guess not,” he said, dull.

“You really want to do this?” George asked a second time.

“I do.”

“It’s not going to be a cakewalk…”

“Learned that the first time around,” Ritchie sighed. “Trust me, love, if I thought it was going to be easy, then I would have tried it a whole lot sooner than now. Now the walls are closing in on me.”

He shook his head.

“Now I haven’t got no other choice…”

“But you do,” George reminded, moving closer to his husband for the first time in God-knows-how-long. “You do… it’s your choice whether or not you want to—”

“I know that much. It’s my choice to better myself and whatnot. But what I mean is that I’ve hit rock bottom now. I’ve hit the point where I either start lookin’ up from my hole or I… I don’t know what else. Or I just curl up and die.”

“Right,” George blinked, his body hollow with shock. “Right, I’m sorry, I just misunderstood.”

“No need to apologize.”

There was an unusually charged moment of quiet then. 

Unusually charged in the sense that Ritchie was the quiet one, sitting and twiddling his thumbs, and George was so full of energy that he felt like he would burst, his brain packed to the brim with words and questions and ideas—even hope, for once.

Hope did strange things to people. 

After a moment revelling in this scene, breathing in the air and feeling it charge his soul, George took one last move, and swung his arms around his husband.

He kept his hands firm on the man’s back, like he would never touch him again after that night, and still out of breath, said, “You’re moving in the direction you need to be, now. You’re makin’ good work.”

Ritchie laughed a little, hearing this. “I don’t think I’ve  _ done  _ much of anything…”

“Well, you’ve realized that you need help. A lot of people never get to that point.”

There was something unspoken in those words, of course, an undercurrent in both men’s minds that whispered, “ _ And I’m amazed you did _ .”

It wasn’t expected that Ritchie would actually make it that far.

Once he had relapsed those four odd years ago, George thought, those dreams had been dashed for both of them.

So they had thought, anyways.

As Ritchie drew away from his husband’s torso, preferring to take gentle hold of his hand, he frowned, and after a moment, said, “We’ve really got a long way ahead of us.”

“But I’ll be here for you every step of the way.”

“It’s… George?”

The other man blinked, confused by the sudden shift in tone.

“Yes?”

“George,” Ritchie said. “I need you to understand… if I’m going to do this, then I need to do this right. ‘Cos there’s a lot of things wrong right now… I’m… I think I’m pretty messed up in the head. We’re all messed up—and we need to sort that out.

“It ain’t easy,” the man went on. “And it sure as hell ain’t comfortable, but we’ve got a lot of shit to unpack here.”

“And we will,” George said, not totally sure what his husband was going on about. “I know we will.”

Ritchie gave him a peculiar sort of look then, a half of a smile beneath downturned eyebrows.

He looked slightly relieved for once; he looked glad.

But he was nowhere near confident. Nor totally relieved. In fact, he looked worried, like he hadn’t gotten his full point across.

In hindsight, George should have taken this for what it was worth.

But hope did strange things to people, as mentioned before.

It blinded George—just a bit. 

He wasn’t naive about sobriety. 

That said, he wasn’t at all prepared for what was to come from that night.


	2. A Little Braver

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to let everyone know how much your appreciation of this story has meant to me--I'll tell you what, with everything I've been through in the past couple of months, writing has sometimes felt like a chore. But for the first time in a long time, now that I've been working on myself and my issues, I've been looking forward to fleshing out this world some more... a big step, in my books.
> 
> Thank you all for your kind words and kudos, and without any further ado, enjoy the next chapter! I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Two days in, and things had gone more or less the way George had expected them to.

He had made quick work of stashing all the alcohol away, though he feared Ritchie would find it at some point. See, when asked whether it might be beneficial to get rid of it all for good, the man had become very on edge.

This made sense, George thought. After all, booze had become Ritchie’s anchor to the whole rest of the world. And he had a point when he said that to get rid of everything—all of the wine and beer and spirits—would prove to be money wasted later on.

And the couple wasn’t exactly in a position to be burning money.

George had resolved that until some holiday or birthday, he would keep the alcohol just out of his husband’s sight in the sparsely-used study drawers. 

Bottles would be bottles again, he decided, and not soul-sucking demons hellbent on destroying his family. 

As for the study itself, well, it was quite a scene.

Truth be told, it was George’s favorite room in the house. Quiet, compact, and lined on the walls with a surplus of books describing everything from sixteenth century Vaishnava philosophy to the making of Star Wars. 

It had a mismatched antique feeling to it, with its navy blue shag carpeting and original Victorian crowning.

And that was part of its charm, in George’s eyes. It didn’t know just what it wanted to be, but it knew it was cozy.

Having moved his desk in there years ago, largely to make space for Dhani’s nursery, the study had also taken on a new role in those strangest of times.

George had decided as soon as he had gotten the word that the study would make an excellent replacement for his office, and so had set it aside as his place to work while at home.

And work he did—twice as hard, now that his was the only source of income in the house. Thrice as hard, as his pay was small enough to begin with.

He was a journalist, after all, a columnist for the local (digital) paper, and suffice it to say, he was not supposed to be the breadwinner of the family.

Still, desperate times called for desperate measures. If his husband was sick as a dog in bed trying to swear off his vices, and his shop was shut down indefinitely, then George supposed he could bear a few long nights of editing. 

Just a few.

He had kids to take care of, of course, a sweating, shaking, withdrawal-depressed husband to look after, and a certain amount of sanity he would like to maintain.

So it was a real balancing act, trying to provide for his family and make sure they didn’t do anything stupid. 

But to help him through it all was… well, his family.

Dhani, in particular, shared many of the sentiments of his father, as far as the study was concerned. And the two were awfully close—George would be the first to admit that the boy had grown up with a bad case of Baby of the House Syndrome, and considering that Dhani was the physical embodiment of one of George’s longest-standing goals (to have a child of his own someday) he had no other choice but to feel especially proud of his son.

They spent much of their time together, if not in the morning, then at lunch, and if not at lunch, then at dinner, and if not at dinner, then in the evening reading stories before the boy’s bedtime.

It was a blessing, really, to be able to have Dhani around him all the time, not worried about what was going on at school or at one of his friend’s houses. 

And Dhani seemed to think so, too. With no more maths class to keep him busy, he had taken to laying on the carpet in the study and reading, poking his head up from the floor every so often to ask his Baba a question, or otherwise talk about whatever suited his fancy.

If George was on the phone—or God forbid, on camera—then his son would also take great delight in eavesdropping on such interesting conversation topics as trying to seem in touch with the younger generation, and when George would be able to finish his article explaining the history and meaning of the Holi festival.

Dhani would laugh, hearing these sorts of things, and lift his head up, with all its messy hair and missing teeth, to ask George who the voices all belonged to. 

It was quaint, the man thought; it was his moment of peace during the day. It was what kept him relatively sane, even with twenty deadlines breathing down his neck. 

So he was more than happy to let his son lounge around in the study.

Even when, as was the case that day, Dhani grew particularly quiet.

His father didn’t think anything of it, at first. The boy was a voracious reader, and on top of that, a budding science-fiction superfan, the type that could lose himself in a made-up world for hours at a time. 

If Dhani wasn’t speaking, George thought, than it was nothing to be worried about—he had just settled in with his books. 

With this in his mind like a mantra, he went about his morning as normal, sipping tea and racing the clock between emails and phone calls.

Periodically, he would leave to check on Ritchie, who, after forty-eight hours without a drink, had turned into a sweating, feverish, trembling mess.

But Dhani never seemed bothered by his Baba’s absence, at least not from the looks of it.

After some time in the study, usually after lunch, he would say goodbye to his father and head off to whatever else he felt like doing, though George wasn’t always sure what that was.

But on that particular day, Dhani never left.

He ate his lunch in near total silence, careful not to spill anything on the carpeting, just as George had warned him, and when he was through with it, he sat quietly on the floor, swami-style.

George cocked an eyebrow, noticing that the boy’s book was face-down on the floor, untouched.

He craned his neck away from the laptop screen, his fingers freezing over the keyboard as he asked, “You alright, love?”

Dhani shot up like a rabbit from its burrow, his eyes wide as they met those of his father. 

“Are you doing okay?” George repeated.

The boy hummed something, wordless and affirmative. It was a yes without the y, e, or s—and it did nothing to reassure his father.

“Somethin’s on your mind,” he sighed, tilting the screen of his laptop down to a forty-five degree angle. “Ain’t it?”

Dhani’s face grew red. “Why would you think that?”

“Well, I can tell love.” George chuckled here, tapping a finger on his head as he explained, “It’s paternal instinct.”

“It’s what?”

“I can tell ‘cos I’m your dad. Dads can tell when they’re kids are upset.”

The boy crossed his arms, defensive. “Well, not you,” he said. “There must be somethin’ wrong with you, ‘cos I’m not upset at all.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure is,” Dhani nodded.

But George could tell it was a facade. If Dhani had been happy, then he wouldn’t have been so defensive.

Nonetheless, the man sighed, “Alrighty, then. Is your book any good?”

He waited.

“I guess so,” Dhani said after a while. 

His father nodded, pulling another trick out of his sleeve.

Dhani, he thought, had been very keen in telling him what he had read everyday.

“What’s happened today?” George asked. “Did Nora make it outta the maze alright?”

The boy fidgeted on the floor, tracing patterns into the carpet. “Um… I haven’t got that far yet.”

His father cocked an eyebrow, his plan coming together like paint being mixed. “She’s still in it?”

A flush. A turn. A mumbled, “I guess she is…”

George stood up without a sound, and encountering no resistance, sat down cross-legged opposite his son.

Dhani looked up at him. “Haven’t you got work to do?”

“I always do. And bein’ your dad’s a part of that work.”

The boy’s response was simple. “Oh.”

Leaning in towards him, trying his hardest to meet his son’s eyes, George lowered his voice, asking, “Now, I get the sense something’s bothering you. You got somethin’ you wanna say?”

Dhani rolled his head back, his neck extended as far as it could go in an extreme attempt to avoid George’s gaze.

His face red, both from embarrassment and blood loss, he grumbled, “I don’t  _ wanna  _ say anything.”

“But would it make you feel better? I’m sure it’s not fun keepin’ everything in your head, now, is it?”

“No…”

“Didn’t think so,” George sighed, taking his son’s hand in his. “So how about you tell me what’s going on? I’d love to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I can help you. I bet I could make you feel better, if you tell me what the problem is.”

“How could you help?” Dhani asked without hope. 

His father chuckled. “I’ll let you know when you tell me.”

“Oh!” the boy groaned. “Baba, that’s not fair!”

George only laughed, a hearty and shallow sort of sound as he ruffled his son’s hair. “It’s life, love. Get used to it.”

Dhani let out an angry  _ hmph,  _ crossed his arms, and stared down at the carpet.

“You’re makin’ me mad,” he muttered.

“I’d better watch out, then, huh?”

“Heck yeah you should…”

Again, George cocked an eyebrow. “And what if I don’t? Hm? What’ll be comin’ my way?”

“A karate chop!” Dhani cried, red-faced but grinning. “A  _ hundred  _ karate chops!”

Pleased to see the boy’s smile peeking out like the sun from behind a rain cloud, George egged him on. 

“One hundred?” he asked, feigning confusion. “What’s that, now?”

“Wh—  _ what’s that _ ?” Dhani raised his voice. “What’s  _ that _ ?! Baba, it’s a hundred, you know it!”

“I’ve never heard of that in my life…”

The boy’s jaw dropped.

Nearly laughing over his words, George added, “Is that a kind of bird?”

His son was fuming now, bursting at every seam with excitement. “Come on, Baba! It’s one hundred; it’s ninety-nine plus one!”

There it was. 

Dhani’s inexplicably mature passion.

Mathematics—for some reason, it was always bound to make him smile.

And John thought his kids were nutty, George thought. 

“Come again?”

“Baba,” Dhani said seriously. “What’s fifty plus another fifty?”

“Two fifties.”

“No, if you add them together!”

“That’s what I heard. It’s two fifties.”

The boy groaned. “It’s one hundred—that’s what it is, it’s fifty times two.”

George raised his eyebrows.

Dhani was getting good with his times tables… at least the twos section.

“Well,” he beamed. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

At first his son’s jaw dropped, frustration visible in his eyes like Venus in the night sky.

But after a single second, it faded away, leaving a smooth-spreading smile in its place, from which the sweet sound of seven-year-old laughter rang out.

“Silly goose…” Dhani laughed.

George nodded. “That’s me.”

They sat in silence for a while, both father and son, until at last, George had gotten the question he had asked for.

“Baba?” the boy said, dim as a dying candle (the way he always called for his father when he was anxious.) 

His father was considerate in his response, asking, “What is it, love?”

For a moment, nothing.

Dhani ran his finger up and down the strings of his jacket, staring down at the carpet like it was the only interesting thing in the room.

And then, with a deep breath and a slight study, he asked, “What’s Dad doing?”

Wrinkles found their way onto George’s face somehow, creeping like shadows between his eyebrows and along his forehead.

His previously neutral expression soured, not like spoilt milk, but like vinegar. He could almost feel the liquid, hot and acidic, begin to flow through his veins, down his neck and along the length of his arms, dripping down his fingertips and hissing on the carpet beneath him.

He knew now where the conversation was headed. Matter of fact, it had been due to head that way for a while—at some point, a point that the boy had brushed by several times, George knew that Dhani would ask what exactly was wrong with Ritchie, why he did the things he did and seemingly cared so little about his family.

But that fact did nothing to ease George’s pain.

He hid it well; he always did. 

He pursed his lips and bit his cheek, injecting synthetic calm into his voice as he asked, “What do you mean by that?”

Dhani blinked, unsure of himself.

“I think… I think something’s up with Dad. Actually, I know it. Something’s wrong, Baba—I don’t see him anymore, and at night sometimes I…”

He trailed off, his eyes wide.

Flushing, he replaced whatever his original thought was with a concise, “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

George nodded slowly, as if in consideration. 

He wanted so badly to tell the boy everything that was wrong, that things had been wrong for years now—but where in the hell he would start, and how he would explain anything to his son, he had no idea.

“Your father,” George sighed, like someone had tossed a pin cushion down his throat. “Hasn’t been feeling very well lately. He’s just been a bit ill.”

Dhani’s eyebrows shot up as high as they could go.

“Oh, God!” he panicked. “Dad’s got the… he has the corn-virus, hasn’t he?”

“Easy now,” his father reassured, cursing himself for forgetting that the boy was a chronic catastrophizer. “It’s nothing like that.”

But Dhani was too far gone, lost in his head—which was not a very pleasant place to be.

“How do you know he doesn’t?” he asked, twirling his jacket string between his fingers. “Lee said that you could get it and you wouldn’t even know! And- and then we would all get it, ‘cos he has it, and—”

“Baba!” he wailed. “Is he gonna die?!”

George clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, his eyes doting and sympathetic, focused on the boy, and sighed, “Oh, love… it’s not anything like that.”

“You don’t know, though!”

The man let his shoulders slump, having just realized they were tense. “I do know, actually. Matter of fact, I can tell you with a hundred percent certainty that your Dad hasn’t got the coronavirus—he’s dealin’ with somethin’, and that ain’t it.”

This did nothing to reassure Dhani, though the very phrase  _ reassure Dhani  _ was a bit of an oxymoron. 

That boy could  _ but  _ his way out of a jail cell, George thought, though he hoped it would never come to that.

“But you don’t know what he has,” his son cried. “Do you?”

George pursed his lips.

“It’s nothing serious,” he lied. “It’s got a name, sure, but it’s just like the flu—if you were to call it by its full name, then you would say you had come down with  _ influenza _ , and that sounds awfully scary. 

“But these days,” The man winced, noticing the skepticism in his son’s eyes. “You just feel bad for a couple o’ days and might sick up some. Most of the time, if you’ve got your shot, you don’t even have to think about going to hospital.”

Dhani frowned.

The hair on his neck standing on end as he noticed this, George paused before asking, “Does that make sense?”

His son didn’t look at him as he mumbled, “If it’s not bad, then why won’t you tell me what it is?”

George bit his cheek.

Too close for comfort, he thought.

“Well?”

  
_ Far  _ too close.

“Dhani…” he sputtered. 

Time had caught up to him.

“The thing that—that you need to understand is that…”

He had given every excuse in the book before, but this time, George had been backed into a corner.

“That…”

Before, Dhani would only catch glimpses of his father’s alcoholism. It was the great taboo in the house, a raincloud hanging over the family that no one could ever speak of.

He shook his head. “Oh, God…”

But for the next—well, however long it would be—the boy would have no school to keep him out of his breaking home, no homework to occupy him while George begged Ritchie to stop yelling so loud, and most worryingly, no soft place to land when things in the house fell apart.

“Baba?” Dhani asked quietly. “I’m—”

“Don’t apologize,” George rushed. “You haven’t done anything. It’s just…”

Rubbing a hand against his chin, feeling for the first time the heat of his skin, he sighed, “I’m not sure how to explain this to you in a way that makes sense. But more than anything, I need you to know that Dad’s gonna be alright. He’s not going to die, he’s not going to hospital… none of that.”

Dhani nodded, though he didn’t seem to believe it. 

“See, love,” The man began, feeling older and less in control than ever. “Your dad’s got… a problem. He’s had it for some time now.”

His son didn’t move, but still his father was keen to watch the rising and falling of the boy’s chest.

George swallowed—not just his saliva, but his pride as well. 

He couldn’t avoid it anymore.

So quietly, almost helplessly, he whispered, “He drinks too much… far too much.”

Dhani nodded. “Dad’s an alcoholic.”

Under different circumstances, George may have congratulated his boy for knowing such an advanced vocabulary word. But instead he raised his eyebrows, his lips a thin, pale line as he unwillingly admitted, “That’s right.”

“And…” His son looked at the ground. “And he’s sick because of it.”

“Smart lad,” George laughed, pathetic. “It’s somethin’ like that.”

Dhani was quick to argue. “I’m not smart. It’s just that Jason told me.”

“He—” The man thought his head would burst, it snapped up so quickly. “He did?”

“Sure he did.”

George drew back, alarmed and feeling about as well as a corpse tossed across the battlefield by a catapult. 

He was almost angry, his head swelling at the very thought of Jason explaining his father’s alcoholism.

See, if George could be sure of anything, as far as his middle son went, then it was that Jason held a grudge against his father—though grudge was a very generous term. To say it was a grudge was to imply it was similar to the way George saw his father at that age, that Jason thought of Ritchie as an old man who simply refused to understand the times they lived in, an improperly proper British gentleman who kept his head low and never caused a stir.

Looking back on it, it was funny just how much George had changed in his older age.

In many ways, he was the man he saw his father as.

Though that was neither here nor there.

The crux of the matter was that Jason didn’t see Ritchie in the light of that classic coming-of-age angst. Jason didn’t see Ritchie in any light at all.

He saw him in the dark, like some kind of demon that had wormed his way into his once-perfect household and dragged everyone down to hell along with him. George was pretty sure, anyway—Jason flat-out hated his father, from the looks of it.

And that made sense, of course. 

Ironic sense, as Jason shared far more in common with Ritchie than George, from their adventurous spirit to their hot-headedness, and even down to their extraordinarily poor and incredibly damaging coping skills.

George supposed that some people, especially with poor self-esteem, were keen to despise those that reminded them most of themself… as was the case with the middle Starkey boy, or the first by order of adoption.

Needless to say, George had little hope that any information Dhani had received had been even close to accurate.

To compare it to his profession, blood sold better than ink—and was much more fun to write, especially when you had a score to settle.

“Well,” George sighed. “What did he tell you, then? You know, he’s still very young, himself.”

“He said that Dad is sick with alcoholism, and that he isn’t ever going to get better, because he doesn’t care enough to. And…”

His face fell further down, somehow.

“And he told me that I…”

George cut him off, the boy speaking too quietly for him to hear. “I thought so,” he said, head shaking. “And he’s partly right—your dad is an alcoholic, sure,  _ but _ he can get better,  _ and  _ not only that, but I know he cares about you all a whole lot.”

“If he cares so much,” Dhani groaned. “Then why don’t he stop drinking? That’d sure help us out…”

The old man tilted his head, sympathetic.

“Oh, love,” he cooed. “I wish it was that simple… see, Dad’s used to drinking so much now. If he don’t do it, then his body’s gonna think there’s something wrong, and it’ll make him feel very sick. And if not doing something—if you went a day without reading, for example; If not reading made you feel like you had the flu, would you ever want to stop reading?”

After a moment’s consideration, Dhani answered, “I guess not.”

“I didn’t think so. But lucky for you, that’s not the only factor at play here. There are pros and cons, yeah? And feelin’ sick is one of the cons. Another one is that not drinking will make him very irritable—he’ll be easily frustrated. But what do you think some of the pros might be? Some of the good things?”

The boy turned his head, staring at the chipping paint on the bookshelf.

“Well… I don’t know. I don’t see what would change.”

George decided to answer his own question. “He wouldn’t be so angry all the time—that’s for sure. He would be much more gentle.” 

Unable to help himself, he laughed a little. “It would be a lot like when you were a baby, you know. Back then he had just gone through it all.”

Dhani stopped moving, frozen still.

“He had just gotten better for the first time. I guess you don’t remember it, but… oh, things were really good. You should have been there.”

“Mm-hm.”

George’s slight smile faded away, growing into a pout as he watched his son. 

The boy’s eyes were empty. 

“Oh,” his father sighed. “Cheer up, love, I’ve—”

“How am I supposed to cheer up?” Dhani cried, the nearly extinguished flame lighting up again like a bonfire. “E-everything is wrong, and Dad is sick, and he’s not gettin’ better, and it’s all my fault, and-and—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” George held out his hand, placing it under the boy’s chin to raise his head in the hopes their eyes would meet. “You didn’t let me finish.”

“Neither did you!”

“Well, I’ve got some good news for you, Dhani. And I think it might change your outlook a little bit, if you’d let me say it.”

The old man cocked an eyebrow, awaiting his son’s response.

Dhani didn’t seem pleased—in fact, he looked rather hurt. 

But still he nodded.

George’s face stretched as he raised his eyebrows. “You want to hear it?”

The boy shrugged. “If it’s really good news, then sure.”

“I’d certainly say it is,” his father laughed. “But let’s see what you think…”

Rubbing his hands together, partially to make light of the situation, and partially to relieve his own anxieties, George announced, “Your Dad and I have done some talking, and he thinks he’s ready now to try and get better. He’s got a lot of time to himself, after all, now that the shop is closed, and he ought to use it for good.”

Dhani tilted his head, his eyes wide and untrusting.

“He’s going to,” his father said after a moment. “For once, I think he’s gonna make good on his word. He’s just got to wait for his fever to break, you know?”

That was oversimplified, of course, and George knew that.

It was more likely (scratch that, it was virtually guaranteed) that Ritchie would find himself with a glass or two to his name every once in a while, sick of being sick and with no fucks left to give.   
There was a bit of a cycle to sobriety—do better, feel worse, get fed up, get drunk, feel worse, rinse and repeat. But from the books George had read on the subject the first time around, this wasn’t exactly a bad thing. 

Cycle though there was, it could be broken. And the way one went about doing so was through the “upward spiral” or the tendency to learn from each relapse, to do better longer, to get less drunk, and eventually, to avoid drinking all together.

New habits would replace the old ones, the books had said, and once that had happened, the ride would grow a whole lot easier; the way George’s mother would have said it, Ritchie would learn to use his brain before his body got the better of him. 

“How’s that sound to you?” the old man asked after a while.

Dhani was sheepish in responding, “I’d like that…”

“You and me both, lad.”

And after a pause, he added, “And Dad, too. He really wants to do better for you guys.”

The boy wrinkled his nose, his eyes shrinking to slits. “Who’s us guys? Like me and Jason and Lee?”

“Exactly. And Zak, too—you’re his kids, and he’s your dad. But he wants to be a better one, ‘cos he’s been doin’ a pretty crumby job.”

“He’s not so bad.”

George pursed his lips, though he didn’t let Dhani see.

If there was anything he learned from fostering children (and Jesus, there was a lot) then it was that no one knew what was bad or strange when they had never known anything else.

So the man only nodded, drawing a sigh as he said, “I’ll warn you, though—he really isn’t feeling well… and this isn’t gonna be easy for him at all. It’ll take a while.”

“How sick is he?” Dhani asked with a frown. “Like… like, is he throwing up?”

George nodded. “He was last night, but if he keeps it up, then it’ll stop soon enough. These first few days are the hardest—”

His son furrowed his brow.

“—But don’t you worry. I’ll be keepin’ a close eye on him.”

“But are you sure it’s close enough?”

“I…” George wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I think so, love.”

“How sure? Like, in percents?”

The man let out a good, hearty laugh. 

“Always have to be sure of everything,” he sighed. “Don’t you?”

“That doesn’t answer the question, Baba! You spend all your time working, and if you’re not working, then you’re cookin’ dinner, and… and… Baba, how are you gonna keep an eye on him  _ and  _ do everything else?”

“I’ve got my ways,” George said, straightforward. “Believe me, you learn to work around things when you’ve got four kids.”

“And what if I don’t believe you?”

And, George thought. It was always  _ and  _ with Dhani. 

“Then you can keep an eye on him yourself. How about that—you could check in on him for me once you leave. I’m sure he’d be happy to see you.”

Dhani shook his head, nothing less than vehement. “I’ll annoy him if I do that.”

“How would you annoy him? You’re his son, Dhani... I know he’d love to see you.”

“I’d do something stupid, though!” the boy groaned. “I’d do something stupid to make him mad at me—I always do!”

“Woah now,” George scolded. “We don’t use that kind of language around here… especially not about yourself.”

“It’s true!”

“You’re not stupid, love. And you know what? If your father gets mad at you because you’re trying to help, then all that means is that he gets mad too easily, and he needs to learn to get that under control. 

“It’s his mistake,” the man said, shaking his head sincerely. “Not yours—He’s goin’ on forty-six now, and you’re only seven.”

“Seven and a half…”

George smiled somewhere his son couldn’t see. “And a half, naturally. You’re gettin’ big.”

“Not that much,” Dhani sighed. “Tracy Bolyn Who Sat Next To Me Last Year is probably twice my size.”

His father cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t say…”

“Oh yeah, she could probably beat me into the ground.”

Here George had to contain his laughter.

Sometimes, he thought, fatherhood was pure bliss.

“Anyhow, you’re taller than last year, ain’t ye?”

“I guess so.”

“And I’d venture to say you’re a little braver?”

“Baba,” the boy whined. “I’m not brave at all.”

“Sure you are! You were brave enough to bring James home to his mum and dad when he busted his knee up last summer.”

“That was only because Sean wasn’t there, though! I had no other choice.”

“Well, a little birdie told me that you made him feel better, even though his knee hurt and he missed his parents—ain’t that brave? That you’re a year younger than he is, and you didn’t even cry?”

“ _ Well,  _ James can… he…”

“Go on, now. I’m listening.”

Dhani gave his father a look of sheer annoyance, squinting his eyes and pouting until his face resembled that of a very old, very bitter man—the type that swore like sailors telling children one-tenth of their age to hop off of his lawn.

“Nevermind…” the boy sighed.

George smiled, proud of himself and his son. “And there we have it, Dhani. You’re a little braver than when you were six.”

“If you insist…”

“So bein’ a little bit braver,” the man said at last. “I reckon you could do something else brave and go say hi to your Dad for me, even if you’re nervous about it.”

Dhani seemed about as amused as a rabbit caught in a shoebox. 

He had been intentionally misled—duped, betrayed, bamboozled, even. And he was not happy about it.

“Baba, that isn’t fair!”

“It’s perfectly fair. You’re a brave boy, and so I’m asking you to do something brave. Fair as could be.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” George sighed. “But know that if you want to do something nice for Dad while he’s feelin’ sick, his door’s always open. You can talk to him anytime.”

Dhani didn’t respond to this.

For a while he just sat there, hands cupped together and resting in his lap as he inspected them.

Then, in a low, almost fleeting voice, he called out one final time, “Baba?”

“Keep talkin’, love,” George huffed, his back sore as he stood up.

“Do you…”

The old man, dusting his chair off as his son spoke, was caught off guard hearing, “Do you really think Dad means it? That he’s going to get better, and… and it’s not just a promise? That it’s a real promise this time?”

George froze. 

Then, turning around and taking his seat, he answered, “I think he means it just fine.”

“And is he really going to get better?”

“He is. I know he is.”

Dhani nodded, and without much afterthought, left the study.

He didn’t shut the door behind him, George noticed.

For a brief moment—a drop of water in the bucket that was time—he felt as though he had something to add, that he should call out once to his son, before he left, and remind him that good things took time.

In order for light to shine, there had to be darkness first.   
But something stopped him.

Something pulled George in the other direction; there grew a feeling in the core of his chest, and this told him everything he needed to know.

Dhani would learn in time, he thought. And learning was better done through experience—anyone could hear anything, and even then, they could choose not to hear things. But statements, laws, and patterns couldn’t justify themselves.

The boy needed proof.

Sighing, George wiggled his mouse and got back to typing.   



	3. Tension and (Imaginary) Release

The clock was ticking.

It was almost seven in the evening by the time George looked at it, cursing himself and his boss as the numbers looped in his brain.

Seven o’clock, he thought, and here he was still in the study, head pounding and wrists stiff from typing. Seven o’clock, and dinner was nothing but a passing thought.

Hopefully, if he was willing to eat (though he sometimes wasn’t, and it gravely worried George) then Jason would whip something up for himself and his siblings.

Grilled cheese, canned soup, or a peanut butter sandwich…. eighteen and with no plans for the future, George was fairly sure that that was all his son knew how to make.

A prayer passed his lips that Dhani wasn’t in a picky mood.

Shaking his head, the old man returned to his work.

It was his choice, a voice in his head scolded. No one had  _ forced  _ him to work overtime. No one had held a gun to his head and made him sit there for over…

He checked the clock again, the bane of his very existence.

7:13.

In two minutes, he would have been sitting there for twelve hours exactly.

That was five hours longer than normal.

Five hours overtime because, to put it bluntly, the Starkeys couldn’t make it on just George’s typical income.

Might as well make use of it, he thought, returning to his work. There was no dilly-dallying, especially not if he wanted to have just a sliver of time for himself before bed.

The idea of it seemed like some faraway dream—but by God, he could taste it. Soon enough he would be laying in bed, back flat and legs crossed over each other, toes wiggling in his socks as he held his book in his hand.

At some point, he imagined, maybe Dhani would come in, suited in his pyjamas, and lay with his father a while, trying to synchronize his breath with George’s in those precious fifteen minutes before the boy’s official bedtime.

That was the life, George thought.

That was what he would do—lay down, read, cuddle with Dhani, put him to bed, come back in, brush his teeth, and then…

And then…

There was a knock on the door, quick and heavy.

“Come in,” he called, clicking into a new tab. 

The knock rang out again.

Louder, trying to keep his cool, George repeated, “Come in!”

Slowly, the door swung open. 

On the other end was Ritchie, his face flushed and his hands shaking as he asked, “Is now a good time?”

The other man bit his lip.

He had two choices—either say no and leave his poor, sick husband alone (this was his third day sober after his sixth relapse of the past three weeks) or say yes and work like the Dickens to try and balance Ritchie’s needs and his own.

But to do that… in his own head, he scoffed. 

There was no such thing as balancing his own needs. He was a husband to a (well-meaning) drunk, a father to four variously traumatized foster/adoptive/biological children, and the brother to a woman in a very similar situation as himself—as a matter of fact, he was her rock.

Sometimes, he thought, there were sacrifices to be made. Love, after all, was a game of sacrifices. And sometimes, that sacrifice would have to be him.

“It’s as good a time as any,” he sighed. “How’d the appointment go?”

“Um…” Ritchie nodded. “It went alright. Had a little trouble getting on, you know—I had to use my phone. But other than that, it was fine.”

“The therapist’s alright?”

His husband was sure of himself as he said, “Oh yeah. She’s real smart, from the sound of it.”

“Glad to hear it.”

For a moment, the only sound to be heard was the clattering of George’s fingers on the keyboard, clicks in rapid-fire succession as he churned out words and phrases and emails to Baby-Faced Tom asking him whether or not he had been able to get ahold of any local business owners for a column on the real-world, small-business effects of the pandemic—Richard Starkey of Starkey Music and Records, in case you were wondering, had declined to comment due to severe and unrelenting personal anguish.

And he failed to comment while in the study, as well.

George didn’t look at him, too busy to do so, although he did feel bad. But he could tell, if not from his sight, then from his soul, that Ritchie was slightly on edge.

There was something on his mind, still, George thought. There was something left to be said.

He waited a moment, expecting it.

Another moment.

  
The clock ticked on. 

“You know,” Ritchie began, uneasy. “If now’s not a good time, then I can—”

“No, no,” his husband sighed. “No, this is fine.”

“Are you sure? I mean, you seem to be working… I don’t want to disturb that…”

Muscles tense as he did so, George closed his laptop. 

“I’m alright,” he said. “It’s all good… just…”

He let out a short sigh.

“Forget it. Let’s talk. How’d it go?”

Ritchie nodded, still unsure of himself, and shut the door, wiping his forehead as he leaned against the bookshelf.

Unfortunately, there was no chair in the room but George’s, though this didn’t seem to bother Ritchie, who said, “Well, it went good, you know. I feel a bit bad, really, that she had to see me lookin’ like this.”

George leaned back in his chair. “Oh, you look alright, dear.”

“Alright?” his husband asked, forcing himself to laugh. “I’m sweating like a pig and shakin’ like jelly set out in a thunderstorm.”

“Oh…”

“Anyhow,” the man sighed. “She didn’t seem to mind—she’s a real nice lady, I think. They call her Rachel.”

George heard a chime, the unmistakable sound of his laptop alerting him that he had an email waiting for him in his inbox. This spiked his interest, his eyebrows raising as, looking at his husband, he lifted the screen and asked:

“Who now, love?”

“Eh—Rachel. She’s the therapist.”

“No; who calls her that?”

Ritchie laughed, a stilted and awkward sound, like it was being coerced out of his throat. “That’s her name, George.”

George read over the email, having to trail his eyes over it a second time in order to understand it.

Blinking, his focus returned briefly to his husband.

“Oh. I see, thank you.”

“Sure,” Ritchie nodded. “Now… are you sure we should be doing this now? I hate to ask again, but—”

Abruptly, and almost angrily, though the frustration was self-directed, George grabbed hold of the laptop screen and snapped it shut like an electric coin purse.

  
“No need to ask,” he rushed. “We’re doing this. I just had to check an email.”

Ritchie’s chin bobbed up and down as he nodded, his lips pursed and his forehead slick with sweat.

He continued, “Anyhow…”

George tried his best to pay attention, and for the most part he did. 

Still, there was a voice in the back of his head, a shrill, nagging voice scolding him.

Couldn’t he have told Ritchie that he was trying to work? That he was stressed as a squirrel crossing the street trying to earn enough money to keep their family afloat, and that he was in no mood—no mood at all—to discuss the intricacies of his husband’s therapy session, as the very thought of such a thing happening to Ritchie sent him into a cycle of guilt and inferiority?

No, he thought. He couldn’t have said that.

He loved Ritchie, first of all. And the bottom line was—there was only so much comfort to go around. It was a limited resource, a finite thing that needed to be distributed. As the head of the house, George was the one to take on the role of the distributor, and as it currently stood, Ritchie needed it the most, followed by Jason, then Dhani, then Lee, and lastly, George himself.

There was no question about it—in a situation where both he and Ritchie were upset, the man had to push his own feelings aside and focus on his husband.

He cared about him too much to see what would happen if he didn’t.

“She really does seem nice,” Ritchie went on. “I guess the first appointment’s all just background stuff… I mean, she asked about everything.”

George cocked an eyebrow. “Everything?”

“Lots of things, anyways. And every question had ten follow-up questions. I don’t know how she talks so much.”

“Gift of the gab,” his husband sighed.

  
Both men seemed to pause then, unsure of what else to say.

“So that was it?” George asked after a while, hoping, though he would never admit it, that the conversation would end there. “She just got some information from you and sent you on your way?”

Ritchie shifted his weight, tucking his hands beneath his crossed arms to try and keep them from shaking. 

Never a good sign. 

“Well,” he stalled. “I don’t know about  _ that _ …”

George leaned back in his chair, feigning relaxation, if only to ease his husband’s anxiety, and put a hand on his chin. 

“What else did she say, then?”

The man rubbed his hand, shaking like a rabid street cat, over his beard, swallowing once as he mumbled, “She gave me some diagnoses, go figure… she thought I ought to talk to you about that.”

His muscles betraying his temperance, George raised his eyebrows.

His mind raced, his thoughts milling about like feral racecars. Diagnoses were nothing knew to him, of course—Ritchie was particularly prone to sudden and often spontaneous medical issues, and had been his entire life. 

But if the therapist was handing out diagnoses…

George’s many years of attending state-mandated therapy sessions with his foster children told him that that did not spell good news.

“Diagnoses?” he asked, slightly alarmed. “What for?”

“As it turns out,” Ritchie sighed in a long breath, like he couldn’t possibly get enough air in his lungs. “You can diagnose alcoholism—and no surprise to me, mine’s considered severe.”   
George spoke calmly enough, though his hands told a different story.

“Doesn’t surprise me, either,” he said. “But it’s good that—”

A voice broke his moment of near relief.

“That’s not all.”

And hearing this, George froze all over. 

It wasn’t that he feared mental illness, or even that he knew little about it. 

Again, he had been a foster father for some seven odd years. In that time, he had seen his fair share of emotional emergencies, dealt with a great deal of crises, and sat in on hours, if not months, of therapy sessions.

He had listened patiently as men and women smarter than him explained the likes of all sorts of diagnoses—ADHD, PTSD, adjustment disorders, disordered eating, dyscalculia, dermatillomania... needless to say, he was well acquainted, at least in theory, with the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

But there was a separate kind of bitterness in admitting that it was no longer the traumatized children on the other side of these conditions, but their well-raised, well-meaning, well-adjusted parents. 

It didn’t make sense to him that Ritchie should be the one struggling when others around him were going through or  _ had  _ gone through so much more. Even in regard to his alcoholism, it had a far greater impact on his family then it did him. 

If things were still relatively (though it was hotly debated in George’s mind) like they were Ritchie’s first time getting sober, then he would be able to get by with just self-help books and lots of support.

If anything, George thought, then it was the children who needed to be in therapy. Jason, in particular; he had seemed to pick up on his father’s habits, and although he was trying, even  _ succeeding  _ in swearing off drugs, George still worried what laid ahead of the young man.

In any case, Ritchie had made the executive decision that this time around, he would need more help than the bookstore could give.

Still, it didn’t make his husband’s words any easier to swallow. 

“It’s not?” George asked, blinking.

Ritchie shifted his weight. “Not necessarily… she, um… Well—”

His face grew red, somehow redder than it already was.

It was a pitiful sight for George to see. There he was, his husband who was once the gentle giant of the house, reduced to a red-faced, shaking, sweating mess who struggled to even stammer. 

“You know,” Ritchie sighed at last. “We went over how I’ve been doing, and the things I’ve been thinking, and what she told me was that it sounded a lot like…”

George braced himself.

A single word entered his mind.

Tension.

“Like depression.”

And release—it was over now. The stillness had been shattered, the word spat out like it was poison, and there was no taking it back. 

“Depression,” George said out loud, as if to taste the letters while he spoke them.

  
Ritchie nodded. “Yeah…”

But his husband didn’t seem to hear him, lost in his own thoughts.

  
Anything else, he could have handled. He had gone down to No Man’s Land plenty of times before, knee-deep in the weeds of seemingly more complicated conditions, as mentioned before.

Hell, he thought, he had dealt with them all just fine! He had never been surprised, rattled, or even overly alarmed when he had heard his children’s diagnoses… more than anything else, he had been pragmatic about them.

The questions before had never been  _ will you repeat that  _ or  _ can you explain that to me, please _ —it had always been a matter of what steps to take next.

Therapies, medications, pamphlets, support groups… George (and even Ritchie!) had always taken them in stride.

At the very least, he had been much more open to such things than nearly anyone else he knew. Paul seemed to have all his ducks in a row, the Harrison siblings famously kept their skeletons in the closet, and John… well, for as much as he talked about breaking the stigma of mental health, he sure seemed to neglect his. Though George would begrudgingly admit to loving the man, John had a history of cheating in relationships, leading to both a divorce in his first marriage and a separation in his second; a near decade-spanning heroin addiction that almost totally destroyed his relationships; absolutely no filter on his mouth that had come a hair shy of killing him; trauma and depression from that near-death experience, and the ever-nebulous ‘mummy issues.’

That being said, the divorce had been solved with heroin, the separation with a forty-day juice cleanse, the heroin addiction with—well, genuine rehab—the lack of a filter had never been solved, the trauma and depression had been managed through—yet again, genuine therapy—and much like the lack of a filter, the mummy issues seemed as though they would remain with John until he was six feet under. 

The inner workings of his mind were, and always would be, an enigma. 

These things—addiction, trauma, family issues— _ these things  _ George could understand.

But depression was new to him. It was a word with only the vaguest of meanings, a word so easily spoken but so difficult to understand.

George knew very little about it beyond the defining sadness it entailed. And he had  _ certainly  _ never known that Ritchie had been struggling with it.

“That…” George shook his head. “That’s not what I was expecting.”

His husband uncrossed his arms, moving his hands into his pockets. “Honestly, I’m not all that surprised by it. I guess you could say I saw it coming.”

“But how?” the other man asked, genuinely confused. “How—what symptoms do you even have that would indicate…”

And hearing this, Ritchie’s skin paled slightly. His lips drew together in a thin, bloodless line, turning down at the edges as if they couldn’t stay upright.

  
“It’s just the mood I’m in,” he said slowly. “That’s what she told me. I’m just sort of watching my life go by from the sidelines, like I’m not actually living it.”

George couldn’t help but push back against this. “Well, you’re drunk so much of the time, it… it would make sense that you feel that way.”

“But it’s like that even when I’m not drunk.”

“When you’re not drunk,” he reminded. “You’re hungover. And if you’re not hungover, then you’re going through withdrawals.”

Abruptly, Ritchie called out his husband’s name.

“George,” he said, exhausted. “It’s been like this a while.”

“How long?” the other man shot back. “I… Ritchie, I think I would know if it’s been  _ a while _ , and by God, you never showed any signs that—”

George swallowed, not realizing his mouth had gone so dry.

“That—”

He cursed himself for his inability to spit the words out. To be quiet, as he was, was one thing, but to be mute was something else entirely—something he couldn’t stand.

“I have, though,” Ritchie said. “I guess I just accepted them as normal.”

His husband’s face grew red, hot as a fire-poker and melting his mind, leaving hardly a scrap of George’s usual, rational brain as emotion took the gears.

The man burst, “Then what were they? If you were showing signs, then what were they?”

Ritchie drew back, as if flinching. “Well… George, I’m not going to say it again after this, but you seem stressed. I don’t know if now is the best time to do this.”

George shook his head. “No…” he sighed, guilt and shame creeping up his spine. “Oh, I’m sorry, I just… don’t…”

“You don’t understand?” his husband offered.

The man felt like the biggest loser in the world, his shoulders drooping as he said, “I don’t. I don’t understand this at all…”

Ritchie took a shaky step forward.

And then another, more confident this time, though the withdrawal tremors never went away.

And he took more and more until after a little while he was on the other side of the study, standing behind George’s desk, behind the chair, behind the clamshelled laptop.

His husband didn’t look up at him, and neither man had to speak to know what the other was saying.

Ritchie held out his arms—an apology—and without thinking, George leaned right on into them until his head was snug against Ritchie’s shoulder; his hands were planted gently on his back, and his hair was caught between the fingers of the only man he had loved for twenty-some years.

It was hard to believe it was still the same man.

“I’m so sorry,” George muttered, his cheek pressed against a damp t-shirt emblazoned with the face of Thomas the Tank Engine.

His husband let out a long sigh. “Oh, don’t be… you haven’t done anyth—”

“I want to understand. I wish I did. I don’t get  _ why  _ I don’t. I mean, if it really is like you say, then shouldn’t I have seen this coming from a mile away? Shouldn’t I have known something?”

“I’m sure you did,” Ritchie said softly. “Matter of fact, I know you did. You’ve seen me get like this before… even back before we bought the house. Remember?”

George thought back to that time, though in comparison to the present, it felt more like some pleasant dream he had once had.

  
His husband went on, “I would just lie around some days, and start crying, and then later on, you would come home…”

“We used to watch Monty Python,” George mumbled.

Somewhere deep, he knew Ritchie was laughing as he said, “We did. I would feel like shit and you would put it on and we would eat dinner on the sofa.”

His husband nodded. “Was that some sort of sign?”

“It was something,” Ritchie sighed. “I would be like that a lot of the time, and then it went away some, and then it would come back… just for years and years…”

That nearly broke George.

He was mad at himself, frustrated, by and large, because he had thought the exact same thing as his husband.

Ritchie could just get a little blue sometimes, he had reasoned. Every once in a while, he would grow a bit less sure of himself, a bit less active, and a bit more withdrawn.

Every once in a while, Ritchie would refuse to leave his bed, not just because he was hungover, but because he claimed he wasn’t able to move. 

Occasionally George would find him sitting fully clothed in the empty bathtub, two bottles of wine at his side, crying his eyes out. When the man had asked what had gotten into him, he was met with a resounding, oftentimes angry  _ you fuckin’ tell me _ . 

But those were perfectly normal things, George had thought. If not for anyone else, than for Ritchie. 

He was prone to pessimism. He was a bit of a downer. He would spend some days, some months, some years, even, in a slump, speaking and moving slower than he had been before. 

It had never been considered a disorder before—it was just the way Ritchie was, some kind of quirk that only he seemed to possess.

And if it wasn’t that, then it was the fault of the alcohol. It was some kind of chemical trick, the sort of thing you would see on a documentary that you only kept on because you were sick and too tired to grab the remote and change the channel. 

It wasn’t serious; it couldn’t be.

But clearly, it was.

And the worst part was that George had missed it all. He had watched Ritchie suffer for years—and God knows what might have gone through his head in all that time—and he hadn’t even known.

His husband was bleeding right in front of his eyes, and instead of doing anything about it, George had stood there and said it was just a part of Ritchie’s character. 

A sick, nagging thought ran through the man’s brain. It wasn’t anything new or unexpected, but George couldn’t help thinking that his husband’s alcoholism could be traced right back to him.

It was his fault, he thought, wasn’t it? If he had just been able to recognize that Ritchie was drinking too much, if he would have said something sooner, if he would have expressed his concern, if he would have thrown out all the beers, if he would have made things a little easier… it was always  _ if _ . 

In this case, it was  _ if he had realized that something was wrong with Ritchie _ .

But he hadn’t. 

And that’s what stung him the most. He had failed as a husband. 

“I am so sorry,” he muttered, as if in a trance.

Ritchie sighed as he reared the man’s shoulders away from him. “You couldn’t have known.”

“I could have,” George retorted. “I should have.”

“Love… I didn’t know either.”

The old man kept his mouth shut, hearing this.

He didn’t think he had anything to say.

But deep down, somewhere he would never admit, a part of him knew exactly what it thought, and would still believe it under threat of execution. 

Of course Ritchie couldn’t have known, it cried. Ritchie couldn’t take care of himself. He couldn’t pinpoint when something was wrong with him, and he couldn’t find any motivation to change it—that’s what George was for. 

After forty-some years dreaming of being a rockstar, or a loving partner, or the father to a child he could truly call his own flesh and blood, that was what George’s identity had become.

He was the one that took care of Ritchie. 

He was the one that helped him, the one who kept him contained. 

If he wasn’t, then who was he? And more importantly,  _ what  _ was he?

He was out of control.

For a while after hope had been feigned, forehead kisses had been planted, goodbyes had been said, and the study door had been shut, George just sat there, staring at his desk.

It hit him, finally:

He was out of control.

Where once there had been a spark of hope, a sense of excitement, even, in the prospect of Ritchie sorting his life out with professional help, there was now dread.

And that dread, George realized, had stemmed from the moment he had understood that it wasn’t any old therapist his husband was seeing—it was a family therapist.

Let Ritchie get his help, but George had no problems that needed to be solved.

He was the one holding the family together, after all, at times with little more than Dhani’s glue sticks and sheer, iron will.

If George was to falter in any way, if he slipped at all—if he wasn’t doing as well as he pretended—then it would all come crashing down, and on his hands nonetheless. 

He shuddered at the thought, and to distract himself, he opened his laptop.

George was not pleased to find his work waiting for him when he did so.  _   
_


	4. Suffocating Persuasion

Rachel C. Ainsley looked nice enough to George.

She was a cool-natured woman with a professional, inviting gaze, a bit blurred from the shoddy quality of her webcam. Her lipstick reflected her personality, a dark, neutral tone just a few shades lighter than her chestnut-colored skin. 

In short, she looked very pleasant and obviously non-threatening.

But looking at her, George was beyond terrified.

He was sure she was a lovely person. She was the kind of woman that George would meet in his gardening groups, or work with on a project in the park, or even become friends with after running into a couple of times.

But that was an illusion, he reminded himself. 

Rachel C. Ainsley was not his friend. As she explained, she was a family therapist specializing in addictions and their impact on a household, and had experience working with those in unique family situations, notably those whose families were divorced, blended, adopted, or fostered.

She had been practicing child psychology for over ten years, so without a doubt, she knew what she was doing. 

So why didn’t George trust her?

She was clearly qualified—in fact, Ritchie had done an excellent job at finding a therapist that could help them all—and beyond that, George had met with many therapists before.

Just… never for himself. 

He supposed that was what scared him the most. For once, the tables had turned—or really, it was the chairs.

George was no longer the one on the other side of the desk, the one trying his best to help someone who had been through hell and back and honest-to-God felt that there was nothing they could do to make their life any better.

He was the broken one.

He was the client.

And unlike his children, he had no person sitting beside him to help him through his sessions, no authority he could turn to at home when the going got tough.

He shifted in his chair.

“So what brought you here?” Rachel asked, snapping him out of his thoughts.

George blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“What brings you here today? Why did you come here?”

The man’s face contorted, his cheeks flushing as he said, nondescript, “My husband said I was meeting with you today. So I came.”

As soon as the words left his lips, he regretted them. What was he doing, acting like a smart-aleck in a therapist’s office?

  
Well—he supposed he was in his own office.

Still.

“Alright,” Rachel nodded. “And do you know why you’re meeting with me?”

“Because my husband is an alcoholic, and he wants to get sober, and so I need to support him in that.”

The therapist tilted her head.

“You feel like you need to?”

George’s whole body seemed to go numb. 

“Of course I do,” he said, slightly indignant. “He’s my husband.”

“Naturally,” Rachel replied, understanding. “That makes a lot of sense—you know, I got the impression from Richard that you both care about each other a lot.”

The man frowned.

She was the one who asked him the question, he thought, and now she was telling him she had already known the answer

“And in the same respect,” she went on. “I understand that there’s a big difference between needing to do something and wanting to do it. Now, I’ve no doubt that you do, and I’ll ask anyways—do you want to support your husband?”

George furrowed his brow, a bit confused. “Of course.”

“That’s what I thought,” Rachel laughed. “I just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page. We try to avoid needing to do things around here.”

“Oh.”

“It’s an adjustment, I know, and I find it very helpful to people to reframe those sorts of statements. Don’t worry, Richard did the same thing… nearly everyone does.”

“I see,” George blinked.

“Now let’s get into it—your husband says you’ve been married for five years?”

The man wrung his hands, nervous. “Yes… but we’ve known each other for twenty-three. That’s how long we were dating, of course. At least on paper...”

Rachel laughed. “I understand. And you have four children?” She looked at something in her lap—a paper, probably. “Zak, Jason, Lee, and…”

“Dhani,” George clarified. “It’s an odd spelling, I know.”

“No worries. How would you describe your relationships with each of them?”

The man thought about this for a moment.

It was a loaded question, that’s for sure.

He supposed he would go in order of adoption—that’s what he kept better track of, as opposed to their actual birth order.

“Well… Jason’s a great kid; he’s got a heart of gold, you know. But he’s very…” He chose his words carefully. “Independent.

“He can be delinquent, also. I’m not sure if Ritchie told you, but he was arrested in November for breaking into a car. He was going to steal the radio and get drug money for it… he has a drug addiction.”

“Do you two have a good relationship?” the therapist asked.

“Oh,” George’s face soured. “I don’t know about that… I love him to death, of course, but I have no idea how to help him.”

“Would you say you feel like he doesn’t like you so much as you like him?”

“Certainly. But he’s only eighteen… I think it’s natural for kids his age.”

Rachel nodded. “Right.”

“And Lee’s great,” the man went on. “She’s got her issues, of course—she had been heavily abused before we adopted her—and she keeps mostly to herself. But we’re on good terms.”

The therapist nodded in acknowledgement, taking notes in her lap as George spoke.

“Then there’s Zak,” he sighed, unsure of how much Ritchie had told the woman. “He doesn’t live with us anymore, but I think we’re close. He was much older when he was adopted, and again, there was a lot going on before he was… but he’s much better now, and he’s really come to trust me.”

“And your youngest?”

George nodded. “Dhani and I are very close—we spend a lot of time together.”

Rachel looked up from her notepad. “And if I remember right, then Dhani is your biological child?”

The man was quick to answer, “Yes. He was conceived through surrogacy—so I’m his birth father.”

“Is he aware of that?”

“Dhani?”

The therapist nodded.

“Oh, sure,” George said. “I mean, he knows as much as what’s appropriate for him to know… he’s only seven.”

Hearing this, Rachel tilted her head slightly, though George saw she was careful not to reveal too much of her own thoughts.

“Would you say that him being your biological child affects your relationship in any way? That is… is it any different than with your other children?”

“The only thing different is that he looks like a carbon copy of me,” the man laughed, anxious. “Other than that, I can’t think of anything.”

Rachel laughed with him, though George wasn’t totally sure how funny she found the joke.

“I understand,” she sighed. “Just wanted to make sure.”

The man on the other side of the screen nodded, and then, in the dull and unbearably awkward silence that arose, shifted in his seat.

He almost said a prayer that that was the end of the session, that Rachel would let him off the hook that day, that George could walk out of that study a free man, and promptly immerse himself in cooking dinner so as to forget the whole experience.

Truth be told, he wasn’t sure how much more he could take.

And then the dreaded question came, like a dagger from the therapist’s lips digging straight into his skin.

Rachel asked, “Now how about Ritchie?”

George’s stomach did somersaults.

“What about him?” he breathed, sounding like the wind had just been knocked out of him.

“Tell me about your relationship with him… what’s that look like?” 

“Well…” George fumbled. “He’s my husband. I love him.”

Rachel said nothing in response, choosing instead to stare straight at (or really, through) her client.

If this was some kind of psychological trick to make him talk more, the man thought, then it was working—and he hated her for it.

“Of course, he’s got his issues,” George went on, slower. “We wouldn’t be here without them… he’s an alcoholic, that’s for sure. And now he’s depressed, too.

“Er—scratch that,” he said. “He’s  _ been  _ depressed for years now… but he’s a strong person. I’ve seen him get through worse; he’ll get through this.”

The man bit his tongue.

He could have said more. He could have added that Ritchie could get through it all just fine without a therapist.

But George knew, or at least half-knew, that that wasn’t exactly true.

Defeated, he sighed, “We get into a lot of arguments… I’m sure he’s told you that. Especially when he’s drunk, he—” George shook his head. “He just snaps. He’s got a bad temper, you know. Even if I don’t call him out for drinking, or coming home late, or punching the walls… anything he does, really. Even if I don’t bring it up, he’ll make me.

“But I  _ need  _ you to understand,” the man stressed, ashamed of how meek his voice sounded out loud. “I do love him. We’ve been together for twenty-three years now, and by God, that has to mean something! I mean…” 

He bit his tongue, thinking for a second that he could taste blood in his mouth, but ignoring it.

His shame was far more pressing, rotting George from the inside out as he admitted for the first time, “I’ve thought about divorce plenty of times; I’ve come too close to it too often. 

“But there’s got to be a reason I haven’t done it. I know there is.”

Rachel nodded, still tortoise-slow though her client’s heart seemed to beating out of his chest.

“Thank you for sharing that,” she said, a soft, infuriating smile passing over her face. “That’s very helpful… and it makes sense. Your husband struggles with controlling his anger, and I get the sense you’re unhappy that he drinks as much as he does, so it’s very hard for you two to communicate effectively—did I get that right?”

“Exactly…”

“And,” Rachel added, emphasising herself. “It sounds like you both care very much about each other, so while you could do or could have done other things—such as divorce—you chose to work through your problems.”

George muttered, “I guess so.”

The therapist smiled. “And isn’t that an incredible thing to do? You know, I think it took a while, but we’ve come to why you’re here.”

“And why’s that?”

“It sounds to me that you’d like to work on your relationship with your husband—is that right?”

Beneath the table, hidden out of sight so Rachel couldn’t see, George wrung his hands. “Of course.”

“Well,” the therapist laughed. “That’s a relief—looks like both of you are on the same page.”

“Thank God…” George muttered, only half-joking.

“And with that out of the way, I’m wondering if there are any other relationships you’d like to work on. It sounded to me like both you and Ritchie are having trouble communicating with your son. Is that right?”

“With Jason?”

The woman shot a glance at her notes. “Yes—your middle son.”

“Oh,” George said, leaning back in his chair. “I suppose we could. But other than the drug addiction, I don’t think there’s anything there that would warrant therapy… for the most part, I think he’s just acting like a normal teenager. He’s an angry kid, you know; same temper as his father. So he’s just in his phase of hating us right now, but I hardly think it’s anything serious.”

“Sure. It’s very normal for kids around his age to hold some sort of fleeting resentment for their parents… and I wonder if, with some of the tensions in the house, and especially the addictions, it might be beneficial for you and him—and Richard, as well—to discuss some of that in here with me.

“Of course,” she went on. “I haven’t met him yet, but from what I’ve gathered he goes from zero to ten pretty quickly. Richard said that he tends to shut down conversations about how he is or how he feels… have I got that right?”

“I would say so,” George blinked.

“Then I wonder if it would be helpful to start those conversations in here, so that if things start to heat up I could intervene. That way there’d be a greater chance of things cooling down at a six as opposed to a ten.”

Her lips stilled.

George only stared at her.

“What do you think?” she said after a moment.

The man felt and thought nothing as he said, “I suppose so.”

Rachel smiled at this and wrote something down in her lap, looking perfectly cordial. And George tried his hardest to reciprocate this professional sort of appearance. 

But inside he was screaming.

Who was she to know what his son would need? How could she understand so much about Jason when she had never met him once? More than his own father, who had raised him for nearly fifteen years?

Who was she to know anything about anyone in that house? To know everything that was wrong with Ritchie, to diagnose him, even, without having known him like George—it was absolutely insane.

He knew that she was the one with the degree, with the license, with worlds more knowledge than George could ever have, with the tools that were empirically proven to help solve the problems the Starkey family faced. He was very well aware of that.

But by God, did another part of him hate her.

He felt like the scum of the Earth, just thinking that. To hold onto hate, he knew, was to hold onto the most constraining aspects of the material world, a bump in the road to the spiritual enlightenment he defined as his life’s purpose.

But Rachel, he wanted to believe, understood nothing about his family.

She hadn’t been the one dragged through the mud like George had been. She hadn’t dated Ritchie, hadn’t seen him through coming out to his parents, through drunkenness and sobriety and fatherhood and everything else under the sun…   
She hadn’t raised Jason or Lee or Zak; she wasn’t Dhani’s father—George was.

So why, he wondered,  _ why in the name of every god there ever was  _ was Rachel the only one who could help them? What was wrong with George—what had he failed at to let his family down like that, to abandon his post, to nearly end up as the reason they fell apart, all because he didn’t try as hard as he should have to keep them together.

George was the one who had stood by everyone in utter silence for twenty years, just standing and watching his family move around him, observing and noticing the patterns they fell into.

He was their rock, even if he couldn’t be his own. 

When their house of cards fell, he still stood.

The only person that could help, after all, was the one still standing—not the woman in the purple cardigan on the computer screen.

Speaking of…

“Then I’ll take note of that,” she said. “And that leads me to my next point, funny enough.”

A low, professional laugh escaped her.

George dug his nails into his palm.

“I’d like to know what your individual goals are, if there are any. Of course, we’ll talk about your goals as a family once we all meet together… but is there anything specific you’d like to get out of your time here?”

The man let out a deep sigh, trying to keep himself in one cool, collected-enough piece. 

“Being able to talk to Ritchie,” he said bluntly. “That’s the biggest one. I can’t… Well, we haven’t really done a whole lot of it lately. The most we say to each other these days—aside from our fights—is just ‘dinner’s ready’ and ‘I’m not hungry.’”

Rachel nodded. “You’d like to be able to talk to him as you would have before his addiction—is that right?”

“Not…” George spread his fingers back and forth on his knee. “Hell, I just wanna be able to talk to him,  _ period _ .”

“Got it; thank you for clarifying.”

The man nodded, too exhausted to say  _ you’re welcome _ .

“So then,” Rachel said slowly. “Do you have any ideas as to what that would look like? Or in other words, how will you know you two are talking in the way that you want?”

George wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

So he just said the first thing that came to his mind.

“I’m sorry to be so brash,” he apologized. “But to start off, Ritchie wouldn’t be drunk while he’s talking to me—I know it’s an awful thing to say, but it’s the truth.”

Rachel peered at him from above her glasses, pushing them up on the bridge of her nose.

Sympathetically, she said, “I don’t think it’s awful at all. It’s what you want, George—it’s what you need, and if you need something, then there’s no shame in asking for it.”

“But it isn’t that simple,” the man argued, shaking his head. “Believe me, if it was as easy as telling Ritchie that he needs to stop drinking, then he’d have done it a long time ago. I can ask for anything I want, but no matter how much I want it, some things are just unrealistic.”

“If I understand this right,” Rachel began. “Then you’re saying that talking to Ritchie while he’s sober is unrealistic?”

George’s hands twisted wildly in his lap, his thumb grazing the soft underbelly of his hand as if on its own accord. “Maybe not entirely, but you have to admit that it’s aiming too high to say I don’t want Ritchie to talk to me when he’s drunk, because of course he’s going to be drunk. He’s an alcoholic—that’s the reason I’m sitting here. Because he can’t stop getting drunk.”

Rachel nodded. “I understand where you’re coming from… you’re absolutely right in saying that you can’t expect your husband not to drink ever again, because slips are part of the process. It’s very good that you recognize that, especially this early on.”

“I’ve had years of experience watching him slip…” the man muttered under his breath. “I think I should know that by now.”

“And when we talk about goal-setting, what we’re looking for is attainable, measurable goals. Something that can be done, and something that’s easy to see it’s been completed. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

But what was her point?

“So I’m wondering if we could rephrase your goal in some way… can you think of anything?”

George’s head swelled.

He promised himself, in that moment, that as soon as he left that call, he would draw a tall glass of water and perhaps spend a moment tidying the shrine.

Something, he thought,  _ anything  _ to get his mind out of that increasingly suffocating conversation.

Trying his best to survive, George sighed, “I’d like to start talking more to Ritchie—especially Sober Ritchie.”

Rachel smiled.

Thank God.

“Wonderful,” she said. “You did an excellent job.”

Her client nodded to acknowledge the praise.

“And is there anything in particular you’d like to talk to him about?

“Not really,” George said, exhausted. “I just want us to act like we used to.”

Hearing this, Rachel nodded again, more sympathetic this time. “Of course… now how about your children? Are there any goals you can think of for your relationship with them?”

The man slumped his shoulders.

He could give her a thousand goals, if he only had the time.

He could spend years listing off every mistake he had made raising them, every hidden truth and naivety.

He could blame himself for Zak moving out so quickly, for Jason’s drug use, for Lee’s total isolation, and for Dhani’s growing (see: uncontrollably spiraling) fears for his family and the world around him.

  
Hell, George thought, he could blame himself for both world wars if he wanted to, and in his head, he already seemed to.

But what good did it do Rachel to hear? What good did it do to say?

She wasn’t there to fix any of George’s mistakes, and George wasn’t there to have his mistakes fixed.

Not by anyone else, at least. 

After all, he had been doing just fine before that evening. He had solved nearly every problem he had been faced with by himself, with the help of no one, and on very rare occasions, with someone else’s advice. 

And maybe he hadn’t always solved them  _ well  _ or in the best way he could have—Jason would never let him forget that—but he had solved them nonetheless.

He had done the best he could, and though he wasn’t perfect, he was nowhere near the point of requiring a licensed professional to tell him how to function.

“No,” he lied, understanding that a lie was sometimes better than a complicated truth. “Not that I can think of.”

“Would it be helpful to you to work on anything with Jason?” The woman on the other side of the screen asked. “I know you had said earlier that you feel like he’s just going through a rebellious phase, and again, that certainly could be a part of it…”   
George braced himself.

  
There was always some condition she had to add.

“And at the same time, I recognize that he’s struggling with drug abuse, and that often comes with a lot of emotional weight on a family, and can be especially damaging to relationships.”

“You’re asking me if I want to talk to him about doing drugs?” George asked, defeated.

“If that’s something you’re interested in.”

“Of course it is,” the man said, quieter than he would have liked. “He’s my son—all I want to do is make sure he’s okay. But it’s like talking to a brick wall… he doesn’t listen.

“If I try to talk to him about his addiction, or how he feels, or about what happened last fall… he just shuts down. I know I need to, but it turns into a screaming match every time. It—it only seems to make things worse.”

“Naturally,” Rachel granted. “Your husband said the same thing… and after hearing all of that, I personally think it’s a great goal to work towards.”

George frowned.

But the woman went on, “It’s obviously something you want to do, and I’m sure it would be for Jason’s benefit, as well. Of course, it’ll take a while, and it’s nowhere near easy...

“ _ And _ —again—I’ll stress that it could be worked on in a session with you, Richard, and Jason, if that’s something you all are interested in.”

George opened his mouth slightly to respond.

But the therapist never noticed, continuing, “That’ll be in the future… for now I’d like to get to know you all better. Still, I think it’s a wonderful thing to work towards.”

She paused.

Finally.

“How does that sound to you?”

Hearing that, the man supposed he had no choice.

The primary skill of a therapist, he was realizing, and perhaps a required one, was the ability to talk a client into an idea of your choosing and make them believe that they had come up with it. 

In other words—suffocating persuasion. 

“It sounds just fine,” he said, unable to think of anything else to say. “Thank you.”

Rachel took a note on what George was assuming was a clipboard.

“It does sound fine,” she sighed. “Doesn’t it?”

The man nodded, inattentive.

“Now, is that everything?” Rachel asked. “I will say, it’s not the focus of my practice, but if there are any intrapersonal issues that would be helpful for us to discuss…”

“You mean any issues with me?”

“Yes—that’s right.”

George shook his head.

How in God’s name, he wondered, was the woman describing intrapersonal issues licensed to work with children?

“No,” he said confidently. “I’m alright.”

The therapist nodded. “Alrighy, then… in that case, I’d say our time’s almost up.”

She laughed. “It goes awfully fast, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does,” George nodded.

His thoughts, however, painted a different picture.

“We didn’t get to everything I’d hoped to… of course, that’s no fault of yours. I’ll tell you what, if I were the one making goals here, I’d be setting quite a few for time management.”

Again, she laughed, and this time in a more relaxed, natural manner.

“Wouldn’t we all?” George sighed.

“Oh, yes, I suppose we would… Now, I’ll get to asking you some of the more personal questions another day. Richard talked a lot about you, but I find it’s better to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—and not to insult.”

“Naturally,” the man agreed, though just the words  _ personal questions  _ were enough to make his voice break.

No matter how qualified, he thought, Rachel had no right to his life.

She was meeting with him for one purpose—plain and simple.

She was meeting with him for Ritchie, not him. The conversation was about Ritchie, not him. 

They would meet for however long they needed to, get in, and get out. 

A no-frills affair, for sure. 

Or… it was supposed to be one.

But  _ personal questions  _ and  _ intrapersonal issues  _ were frills without a doubt, and frills were neither wanted nor needed.

The therapist took a glance at something to the right of her. 

“I’m not sure when I’ll meet with you next… though I would like it to be you that I see.”

If you insist, George thought.

Rachel continued, “If you’d like, you could give me your phone number or email address. I know I have Richard’s… I’ll use that as a sort of home base for you all… but it might be nice to have yours alongsi—”

“No thank you,” the man interrupted. “You can reach me just fine through him.”

Opposite him, from the inside of the screen, the therapist nodded. “Got it.”

  
She smiled. “In that case, I’ll let him know. And you, George, are free to head out.”

George said a silent thank you to every god he could think of—whether he was familiar with them or not.

“Alright,” he sighed. “Thank you, Rachel.”

Another smile, wider, and in that irritatingly professional manner she carried herself with. “Thank you. Goodb—”

But the tab had closed; it was too late.

And then the laptop, its two perpendicular faces making contact with a soft tapping sound.

George, on the other hand…

He didn’t close anything.

He burst open like a floodgate in a storm, a pained groan forcing its way out of his throat involuntarily.

He never felt his muscles slump or his neck sinking, but before he could even think, George’s forehead was pressed against the top of his laptop, though the warmth stung his skin.

His hands dangled limp at his sides, his shoulders bobbing up and down as the sobs began, tearless, at first. There was a rather long moment of tension in which George’s breathing and groaning clearly indicated he was upset, and sounded, even, as if he was crying, but he felt no water running down his face but his own sweat.

That moment ended quickly.

And before he knew it, though he dared not to admit it, George Starkey was reduced to a sobbing mess on the study desk, a frightened, pitiful creature with a burning forehead and a burnt-out soul.

It had hit him, finally, that this was his life. 

That woman, that helplessness, that sweat on his palms—that was his life now. 

Somehow, the same man who at twenty had felt ready to conquer the world with nothing but a picture of his siblings in his wallet had been worn down past the breaking point, and had been reduced to a middle-aged good-for-nothing,

At twenty, George had been sure that whatever life had coming for him, however good or bad or unexpected, he would take it as easily as he took his lighter from his pocket. 

And there he was, forty-three years old, married to a drunk, the father of a felon, and talking to a therapist about it all.

How stupid, he wondered, could he have possibly been to think his life would have turned out any different? God, no matter what it cost him, no matter how differently his life would have turned out, if George was given the opportunity to go back in time and sew his mouth shut just to keep that cocky, unibrowed bastard he was at twenty from telling his flatmate he was in love with him—

A creak from the other side of the study snapped him out of his spiralling thoughts.

Fear spread across his back like someone had poured ice water down the length of his neck.

There was no way in hell Ritchie could see him like this.

He didn’t look up at the sound, too ashamed to try, but he was able to recognize that it was a soft sound—caring.

There was a small click and a number of muffled footsteps, and when finally George gathered the courage to lift his shoulders, then his neck, and lastly, his eyes, he was greeted by two pale arms, crossed and with both hands tucked under the opposite elbows.

“Baba…” Lee said quietly.

Her father shook his head, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand.

He said nothing.

“Baba,” she repeated, slightly louder. “Are you—”

“Oh,” he sighed, his voice much higher-pitched than usual. “We’re gonna be alright, love… we’re going to be alright…”

The girl shifted her weight slightly, hesitating as she muttered, “I don’t know if I’m the one that needs to hear that, Baba.”

George laughed, though the sound was hollow, through and through.

“Clever girl,” he said. “You’ve got me all figured out, haven’t you?”

“Somewhat,” she shrugged.

There was a long pause between them, and in that space George’s mind seemed to play catch-up, his thoughts still red and flashing, warning him that someone was in the room watching him cry.

And then Lee asked, without ever asking what had happened (something she had certainly picked up from her father,) “Can I do anything?

George leaned back in his chair, exhausted.

Looking at her, having fallen back on his wise old paternal persona, he began, “Did I ever tell you about samsara?”

The girl shook her head.

“Well, there’s a Hindu concept that says even when you die and your physical body decays, your soul is eternal and can reincarnate… so it just goes on its merry way and travels from body to body until it eventually breaks out of the material world and you become one with the universe.

“Essentially,” he sighed, feigning collectivity. “It’s the wheel of life and death that’s always spinning, the force driving us all to wherever we’re bound to end up.”

Lee bit her cheek.

“I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

Hearing that, George laughed, and simply concluded with, “It hasn’t got anything to do with you, really…”

He paused.

“But I’d say it’s due for a holiday, wouldn’t you?”

The girl shook her head, and before leaving the room, sighed, “I don’t know what you mean…”   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to all my therapists for providing the inspiration for this character XD  
> I would be lying if I said I didn't see my mental health struggles as (very unfortunate and unwanted) firsthand research for this story...


End file.
